Categories: Programming, Links

This page provides links to articles, books, and videos, which may be of interest to programmers of all levels; they are certainly things I thought were useful.

Getting Started with Programming

• Beginners in Open Source - how to get involved in the Open Source world.
• Programming Ruby: The Pragmatic Programmer’s Guide (see link “Programming Ruby by Dave Thomas”) - a guide to learning the Ruby programming language.
• Git Ready: learn git one commit at a time - how to use the Git version control system

Development Processes

• Meetings - where work goes to die.
• Maintaining Software - maintaining software sucks, and what we can do about it.
• Pounding a Nail - how to respond to questions which have false assumptions.
• The Oracle Effect - how rituals can override common sense.
• Is Project Management Killing Good Products? - how time-estimates and delivery deadlines can damage software development
• The Manifesto for Agile Development and [video] “Pragmatic” Dave Thomas: Agile is Dead
• Too much collaboration hurts productivity
• Hivemind: the problem of interruptions
• Kurt Cagle: The End of Agile - a critical view of Scrum methdology
• Matt Asay: What Makes Developers Happy?
• Thoughtworks: Pairing, Are You Doing It Wrong?
• Heusser: NoEstimates in Action: 5 Ways to Rethink Software Projects
• Hansson/BaseCamp: Building Software (ShapeUp)
• Lightweight ADRs at willhaben
• [video] Rich Hickey: Hammock Driven Development aka Step Away From The Computer - solve problems by thinking instead of doing
• [video] Dan North: Beyond Developer - what it means to be a modern developer (roles, responsibilities, cooperation, community). First third is slow, the rest is very interesting!

Useful links related to Software Development Methodology and related topics

• Software Maintenance and Dynamically-Typed Languages - why do dynamic languages make it difficult to maintain large codebases?
• Chelsea Troy: Reviewing Pull Requests - some excellent advice on performing code-reviews
• [video] Sandy Metz: Go Ahead, Make a Mess - reducing interdependencies in code

Advanced Programming Topics (see also Java-specific resources)

• [video] Richard Feldman: Why Static Typing Came Back - why (some) static typed languages are more productive than dynamically typed ones
• Learning New Languages: Exercism - download and solve problems in 30 different programming languages.
• Bartosz Milewski: Programming Cafe - type theory and other abstract concepts; a dose of humility if you think you know how to program!
• Inside a super fast CSS engine – internals of the Mozilla Stylo component
• Graydon Hoare: What Next? – a list of open issues in theoretical programming language design
• The Commandline Challenge - a fun way to test your Unix commandline skills
• The Go Garbage Collector - how Go’s runtime achieves such low garbage-collection-pauses, and the tradeoffs it makes
• Evan Miller: Four Days of Go - an interesting and entertaining look at the Go programming language
• Functor and Monad Examples in Java
• Milewski: Category Theory for Programmers
• React as a UI Runtime - a deep dive into the implementation of React
• Project Jigsaw: Late for the Train - some background to the Java module system

Software Testing

• [video] Ian Cooper: TDD, Where Did It All Go Wrong – Argues that tests are intended to verify system requirements/behaviours, not methods - so do that, ie only write tests which express requirements on the overall system. Refactoring then doesn’t break tests - because refactoring never changes external behaviour, even when it changes internal implementations. This implies not testing classes in isolation; use “deep” tests instead of shallow ones. This in turn suggests that dependency isolation and injection is pointless except where code meets “the external world”.
• Continous Delivery: Don’t Chase Test Coverage - excellent advice on writing tests
• CodingHorror: doing terrible things to your code – a great discussion of code-testing and producing production-ready code.

Programming Reference Documents

• Bash Scripting for the Reluctant - helpful “cheat sheet” information for shell-scripting under Unix
• WebsiteSetup: CSS Cheat Sheet - a nice (and complete) summary of all CSS3 (cascading stylesheets) elements and attributes
• The jsonapi protocol specification - a standard describing how to represent RPC calls as JSON

Database-related Topics

• Faster SQL Paging Using the Seek Method
• Postgres Transaction Handling
• Seldo: ORM is an Anti-pattern
• Wikipedia: the Active Record Pattern

Security and Cryptography

• LearnCryptography - an introduction to cryptography for beginners/intermediates
• What is Kerberos
• [video] Michel Schudel/Youtube: Crypto 101 for Java Developers
• Schneier: The Availability Heuristic

Interesting Blogs

• Octo

Distributed Systems

• Microsoft OAM and DAPR - tools for developing microservices and kubernetes-based applications.

Amusing (but also sadly true)

• [video] The Expert - a short example of the “business analysis” phase of a project
• The half-arsed Agile Manifesto - when the Agile Manifesto meets reality
• OPS Lessons - the hard truth about how complex IT systems actually work, eg:
  • Some of your most critical services are kept alive by a handful of people whose job description does not mention those services at all
  • If you break it, you own it - for now; if you fix it, you own it - forever.
• Commit Strip: A Comprehensive and Precise Spec - when programmers are no longer needed..

Other

• Configuration Management Tools Review : Puppet, Chef, Ansible, Salt

Quotes

• “A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked.” – John Gall, Systemantics (as seen on slashdot)
• “My point today is that, if we wish to count lines of code, we should not regard them as ‘lines produced’ but as ‘lines spent’. – Edsger Dijkstra
• “Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is an absurd one.” – Voltaire